Saturday, 17 October 2015

At 5:45 in Washington, D.C., the switchboard at the Pentagon was warned that bombs planted
somewhere in the building would go off in ten minutes. "You killed hundreds of us today in the
streets of Washington," said the woman's voice. "But we are still giving you a chance to evacuate the
building. You do not have time to find the bombs. Leave the Pentagon now, and let history be the
judge of which side truly fought for life and against death."

The highest-ranking personnel in the Pentagon (and, with revolution breaking out in the nation's
capital, everybody was there) were immediately moved to underground bombproof shelters. The
Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that there was a 95
percent probability that the threat was a hoax, intended to disrupt the job of coordinating the
suppression of revolution across the nation. A search would be instituted, but meanwhile work would
go on as usual. "Besides," the Secretary of Defense joked to the Chief of Staff, Army, "one of those little radical bombs would do as much damage to this building as a firecracker would to an elephant."
Somehow the fact that the caller had said bombs (plural) had not gotten through. And the actual
explosions were far more powerful than the caller had implied. Since a proper investigation was
never subsequently undertaken, no one knows precisely what type of explosive was used, how many
bombs there were, how they were introduced into the Pentagon, Where they were placed, and how
they were set off. Nor was the most interesting question of all ever satisfactorily answered: Who
done it? In any case, at 5:55 P.M., Washington time, a series of explosions destroyed one-third of the
river side of the Pentagon, ripping through all four rings from the innermost courtyard to the
outermost wall.

There was great loss of life. Hundreds of people who had been working on that side of the building
were killed. Although the explosion had not visibly touched their bombproof shelter, the Secretary of
Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous other high-ranking military persons were found
dead; it was assumed that the concussion had killed them, and in the ensuing chaos nobody bothered
to examine the bodies carefully. After the explosions the Pentagon was belatedly evacuated, in the
expectation that there might be more of the same. There was no more, but the U.S. military
establishment was temporarily without a head.

Another casualty was Mr. H. C. Winifred of the U.S. Department of Justice. A civil servant with a
long and honorable career behind him, Winifred, apparently deranged by the terrible events of that
day of infamy, took the wheel of a Justice Department limousine and drove wildly, running twenty-
three red lights, to the Pentagon. He raced to the scene of the explosion brandishing a large piece of
chalk, and was trying to draw a chalk line from one side of the gap in the Pentagon wall to the other
when he collapsed and died, apparently of a heart attack.